Monthly Archives: February 2013

If you’re a longtime Sibelius user, like me, your favorite person in the world is probably Daniel Spread­bury. This morning he posted a new blog at Stein­berg, where he and the former Sibelius team are working on an entirely new notation program. Pretty thrilling stuff.

But did you catch this epic dig at his former employer, Avid, basi­cally implying that they have aban­doned Sibelius entirely (despite their insis­tence to the contrary)?

…the number of compa­nies actively working on profes­sional music notation software is very small, and perhaps now numbers only two (one being Stein­berg, the other Make­Mu­sic).

The Polon­aise-Fantaisie is to be classed among the works which belong to the latest period of Chopin’s compo­si­tions which are all more or marked by a feverish and restless anxiety. No bold and bril­liant pictures are to be found in it; the tramp of a cavalry accus­tomed to victory is no longer heard; no more resound the heroic chants muffled no visions of defeat—the bold tones suited to the audacity of those who were always victo­ri­ous. A deep melancholy—ever broken by startled move­ments, by sudden alarms, by disturbed rest, by stifled sighs—reigns through­out. We are surrounded by such scenes and feelings as might arise among those had been surprised and encom­passed on all sides by an ambus­cade, the vast sweep of whose horizon reveals not a single ground for hope, and whose despair had giddied the brain, like a draught of that wine of Cyprus which gives a more instinc­tive rapidity all our gestures, a keener point to all our words, a more subtle flame to all our emotions, and excites the mind to a pitch of irri­tabil­ity approach­ing insanity.

All composers, but partic­u­larly composers who are salaried by academic insti­tu­tions, need to be aware of their audience … If the composer is writing music as an academic pursuit then they should go into it fully aware that this is what they are doing, and not be crushed when the world doesn’t want to storm the concert hall demand­ing to hear their music. If they are writing music to say some­thing about them­selves and the world we live in today, then they need to be aware that what they say needs to be a least partly intel­li­gi­ble to the average concert-goer.

And:

It is acad­e­m­i­cally inter­est­ing to ask a cellist to pluck their A string with their teeth while de-tuning their C string with their right hand and slapping the body of the instru­ment with a kipper with their left. That is an expan­sion of orches­tral tech­nique, and it is certainly original. But as soon as you trans­port the kipper-slapping cellist out of the sphere of academia, put them in a concert hall and ask people to cough-up 25 quid and give up an evening of their lives to come and listen to them, the paradigm shifts.

Because this is why composers go into academia: to research new extended tech­niques involv­ing seafood. Allow me to retort with a Steve Jobs quote:

This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our comput­ers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer.